Every description of the world we inhabit embodies certain processes of describing. In this book, researchers from the fields of anthropology, architecture and fine art reflect on the descriptive practices characteristic of their respective disciplines, and the potential of alternative modalities of description to transcend the boundaries that divide them. They focus on the interconnections between writing, imaging, drawing and reading, exploring the many ways in which different media and notational systems can be used in contexts of learning to facilitate the translation of knowledge across the three disciplines. The approach is to regard art and architecture not as objects of anthropological analysis but as investigative and exploratory practices, on a par with anthropology. Thus the aim is to disclose the synergy between art, architecture and anthropology – a synergy that lies not so much in the products of the three disciplines as in their ways of working. The book is based on a collaboration between the School of Fine Art at the University of Dundee and the Department of Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen, in the context of a three-year, AHRC-funded project, Learning is understanding in practice: exploring the interrelations between perception, creativity and skill. The project culminated in an exhibition held at Aberdeen Art Gallery from April to June 2005. This was not an exhibition of artistic, architectural or anthropological works. Rather the exhibitors, including artists, architects and anthropologists, were challenged to reflect on their own ways of working, and of knowing, within the context of an ongoing interdisciplinary dialogue. A central aim of the book concerns the study of the conjunction of perception and action within practitioners’ ways of knowing and working. Influenced by James Gibson’s (1979) pioneering work on visual perception, ecological psychologists have shown how the development of perceptual skills - or what Gibson calls ‘the education of attention’ - takes place within the contexts of perceivers’ direct, practical engagement with their surroundings. This has been paralleled, in science and technology studies, by an approach to knowledge as grounded in environmentally situated actions, developed by Lucy Suchman (1987, 2007). Building on this work, the sociologist of science David Turnbull has explored the relation between local knowledge and comparative scientific traditions, in a way that could have direct parallels with my investigations of how locally developed, skilled practices contribute to environmental perception and understandings of nature (Turnbull 1993, 1993-1994, Ingold 2000), the politics of objectification (Harvey 1998), the connections between persons, technologies and places (Harvey, Green and Agar 2000), and the relation between ‘local’ and ‘global’ knowledge systems (Strathern 1995). While anthropological research concerning the nature of embodied practice can contribute to an understanding of how creative practitioners’ work, by placing their knowledge and skills within their social context, studies of skilled practices of vision in anthropology have had a tendency to separate culture and environment and emphasise the cognitive over the social (Küchler 2002). These artificial boundaries are problematic when it comes to understanding creative practitioners’ ways of working and ways of knowing. Indeed such disjunctions actually accentuate the division between gesture and speech. I have shown, to the contrary, that the interconnections between speaking, drawing, imaging and writing are central to understanding skilled practice (Gunn 2002, 2005, 2007). Seeing is not ‘just’ seeing, skills have to be learned. In learning to pay attention to environmental features, seeing becomes a way of knowing (Roepstorff 2007). Learning to see involves developing a heightened awareness of the subtleties of movement. Within a situated context as Suchman proposes, ‘anthropological studies offer the possibility of moving our understanding of seeing from the realm of the optical and cognitive, to an appreciation for the visual as based in culturally constituted artefacts and embodied practices’ (1998: 10). Inscriptions resulting from professional ways of seeing nature, events or people are part of a situated activity (Goodwin 1994). Anthropology can offer a wider understanding of what is meant by situated action, especially when considering the dynamic interrelation between human gesture and speech. An understanding of human action as a mind/body interacting within a world of social relations challenges existing interpretations of human gesture as a cognitive and physical process lacking in human emotion. Taking Suchman’s idea of the situatedness of human action as a starting point, I will follow up her assertion that plans are a resource for situated action. Placing creative practitioners words, letters, numerals and diagrams within a network of sociotechnical relations, I challenge the normative model of art and design history that positions representations, illustrations and explanations of doing outwith of the actualities of the everyday. Within a creative process graphic elements taken from different notational systems are often combined. How these components are related in the pursuit of understanding and remembering are central to the rationale behind the publication
